Taalstrijd in Afrika : het taalwetsartikel in het Koloniaal Charter van 1908 en de strijd van de Vlamingen en Afrikaners voor het Nederlands in Afrika tot 1960

The Colonial Charter, the organic law that regulated the Belgian state’s takeover of Congo from the private ownership of King Leopold II in 1908, contained an article about language rights in the colony. While language rights for the Congolese were mentioned therein, the article primarily dealt with language rights for the colonizing Belgian minority. The article came about on the insistence of several Flemish members of parliament during debates held in the Chamber of Representatives in the first half of 1908. In this article, these debates are discussed in order to provide a historical explanation for the semantic and language-ideology background for each section of this article of the Charter. In addition, light will be shed on how not only in 1908, but also in the following decades (and until decolonization in 1960), particularly whenever Flemish politicians complained about the spotty application of the article and the continuing dominance of French in Belgian Congo, they pointed to the Afrikaners and Afrikaans in South Africa in order to make a strong argument that Dutch was, or could become, an important language in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Notably, South African thinkers and politicians also pointed out the presence and official status of Dutch in Belgian Congo on several occasions, namely in their own struggle against the domination of English over Dutch/Afrikaans. Moreover, from 1914 onward there were direct contacts between Flemish and Afrikaner politicians concerning this matter. The conclusion of this article suggests that in the last years of Belgian colonialism, the Congolese elite reacted quite negatively to Flemish demands for a bilingual colony because they saw in such demands a colonialist hindrance on their chances for socioeconomic emancipation